I was hanging out with Baroque this weekend, and he showed me his import copy of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (called something else in Japan... I forget what) for the DS. This is probably the game that will finally decide me to buy a DS, since I'm an avid fan of the series. I didn't actually play, but it looked very good. The art style in the character portraits is very generic-anime, since the art designer for the past several Castlevania games is working on the PS2 game, but the in-game graphics were quite satisfactory.

Since Castlevania had been brought up, we decided to test out Baroque's Messiah NES wireless controllers on his Famicom cart of the original. The controllers are great--no sharp corners anywhere, even on the d-pad (which is more of a cup-shaped dealie a la the Neo Geo pad), and the control is very responsive. The direction-cup IS just a tad sensitive, though... just resting your thumb slightly off-center on it will result in character movement.

Playing though old-school Castlevania-and seeing the upcoming one-put me in a Dracula-killing mood, so for the last few days I've been going though the GBA games again on my GB Player. I can't believe that I actually hadn't finished them all! When I fired up my old saves, I found that I had only actually completed Harmony of Dissonance, although I was ready to face off against Dracula in Circle of the Moon and had made significant progress in Aria of Sorrow. I did have a lot going on when I was playing them, and I guess I put them down for a little while and just forgot to pick them back up.

Well, the old me's loss is the new me's gain (how grammatically incorrect was THAT sentence?). I've been finishing out my card collection in CoM and leveling up a bit--and I'm just about ready to try out the Battle Arena I've heard so much about. After that, I'll finish off AoS, then maybe play though the games' other modes. By the time I'm done with all that, DoS will probably be out in the US. Otherwise I could always take the mighty Symphony of the Night off the shelf...

With big developers like Midway, Capcom, Sega, Activision, Taito, Namco, etc. putting out collections, why is Konami sitting on it's duff? Give us the Contra Collection and the Gradius Collection, but most of all, give us the Castlevania Collection! All the 8- and 16-bit games should do for the first volume, but Rondo of Blood better be on it, because not many of us have a PC Engine laying around. I DO have pretty much every other Castlevania game in the original form, but I'd pay good money to have them all in one place.

Heck, just give me easy access to Super Castlevania IV without having to unpack my SNES, and I'll be a happy little vampire-killer...